Warwick Boulter (Collaboro)
Macquarie Cloud Services has signed up digital asset management company Collaboro to store and preserve more than 3.5 petabytes (PB) in a multi-year deal.
Collaboro offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to centrally store, manage, surface and share large-scale digital media asset libraries.
The company currently works with multiple companies and enterprise marketing teams, including McDonald’s Australia and New Zealand, Optus, Sportsbet, Youi and the NSW Department of Education, among others, with all its assets coming to over 3.5PB.
Collaboro sought alternatives to its previous public cloud solution and chose Macquarie Cloud Services to develop a unique solution leveraging its Launch Private Cloud, which is built on Dell Technologies infrastructure solutions, including Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage and Dell PowerEdge Servers.
It also uses a high-speed Megaport cloud bandwidth connection and is contained and managed by Macquarie Data Centres’ sovereign, government-certified facilities.
The end solution does not provide egress and ingress – data transfers to and from the cloud, respectively – charges, which is beneficial for Collaboro as these costs associated with its previous platform were starting to skyrocket.
“Australian companies use a stockpile of existing assets to weave into different marketing and ad campaigns,” said Collaboro founder and CEO Warwick Boulter.
“That’s important for brand consistency, but it means moving large data files around more than would be typical in other departments. As the data stockpile grows, so can the transfer costs – Macquarie Cloud Services keeps this element of cost at exactly zero.
“Further, the ability for our customers to leverage their vast marketing asset pool as a training set for future generative engines will rely heavily on that asset pool being easily available and deployable – i.e., not constrained by egress and transfer costs.”
After moving to the new platform, Macquarie said Collaboro is developing various artificial intelligence- (AI) powered solutions, such as AI-driven government, risk and compliance (GRC) capabilities to automatically label, search for and identify people, things, words and more in images and video content.
Additionally, Collaboro is looking at AI generation tools for imagery and videos by presenting learning datasets so customers can tailor generative engines specifically to their brand by using machine learning (ML) on existing content.
“We have gambling, insurance and alcoholic beverage clients who adhere to legislation on what can be shown in their advertisements,” said Boulter. “We will shortly have the ability to apply rules within our SaaS platform to run intelligent searches over their media assets to make sure they’re compliant with the law and provide immediate reporting and dashboarding of GRC topics. This saves so much time and lowers regulatory risk.
“The additional capacity we have with Macquarie Cloud Services helps to enable these advances because you need a long data runway once AI is involved. They’re on that journey with us, redesigning their cloud services and data centres for the AI era.”
In September, Virtual IT Group (VITG) expanded its agreement with Macquarie Cloud Services to deploy more of the latter's Launch solution for healthcare clients.
